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Showing posts from October 26, 2022

Bloggers Club October 2022 - Trick or treat - Irreproducible Bug

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 Let me tell you a spooky story about an irreproducible bug. It took a place a long time ago, before seven companies, and seven projects, there stood an irreproducible bug! At the time this happened I was working on a fairly large enterprise project,. The whole system was made up of various applications, written in a few different languages, over time, by many different teams.  The core defect was a bit of an edge case, where just users with certain country codes would not get eCommerce promotional emails sent to them. It was a wild goose chase, I was the first to investigate the bugs, as I was in the application support team at the time, about 20 hours per week. I tried in different environments, but to no avail - I could not figure it out. Used a test harness to trick the dates, as it was a kind of email that gets sent 24 hours after registration. I got very stubborn about it and spent about 4 hours without getting up from my chair, trying to figure out the root cause. Why was this e